Collective Liberation & Colonial Legacies, Intro
An introduction to a series of conversations on intercultural solidarity
I first learned about Minnow at the Regenerate conference in late 2022 while supporting a cohort of majority BIPOC land stewards in attendance. The cohort started to open up after a few speakers (out of dozens) elucidated the history of land ownership and the potential for land return to Indigenous communities in the so-called US. Minnow’s Director of Land and Financial Redistribution, Neil Thapar, was one of the speakers. I was grateful for their disruption of the status quo; the usual sanitizing of agriculture & climate discussions from the ongoing effects of colonization.
I later learned that Minnow was led by collaborators of Vietnamese, South Asian/Indian, and Puerto Rican descent who have dedicated themselves to securing land tenure for Indigenous communities and farmers of color on Turtle Island. As someone who believes in the necessity of supporting movements beyond borders, I wanted to learn more about them.
And so I reached out to Minnow with a series of questions about both the purposeful challenges and resources within our respective legacies, myself embodying Kuwaiti, Iraqi, Vietnamese, diasporic, and interfaith lineages. I asked about their organization and how it fits into a vision of intercultural partnerships in land sovereignty work. Fast forward to Autumn of 2023. I was able to speak with Minnow’s co-directors from September through October, just as the latest aggression on Gaza started and amidst growing global awareness of the 75-year genocidal Israeli occupation of Palestine.
We were not planning on sharing these conversations during a time of sharpening contradictions and heightening consciousness around Palestine and the interconnectedness of global movements, yet that is where we’ve found ourselves. We spoke about carrying unique resiliencies & colonial subjectivities that form a broader picture of how we move toward collective liberation. I do not take for granted that more of us are remembering our shared histories; learning and unlearning our oppressive conditionings, and remembering our collective power to change this trajectory.
As you’ll read later in the full interviews, Palestinians’ relentless spirit of resistance is echoed in other occupied territories, like Puerto Rico. Minnow’s Director of Strategic Storytelling, Javier Roman, was born and raised there. Reflecting on his lineage as a colonial subject, he shared with me that “there is a component about resistance, particularly among folks who stay in the island no matter the circumstances, which is just saying no–we’re going to stay here [...] this is our piece of rock between the Atlantic and the Caribbean and we’re just going to make it here.” Puerto Ricans have endured worse conditions with much fewer resources, he says, and they’re going to make it there while also being themselves, “It doesn’t matter that we have a US passport and that we’re second-class US citizens. We’re still Puerto Ricans. We’re never going to be ‘Americans.”
I am deeply changed each day as I continue to witness this resistance, awakening a defiant recognition of my many embodiments and legacies. My inner architecture is continually reorienting as I observe organizers & protectors wisely act on the indivisibility of our liberation; Palestinian, Indigenous, Diasporic, Migrant, Jewish, Arab, Muslim, and many more. Thanks to them, I’m learning how the same colonial tactics from before 1492 to 1948 to today are deployed on land and people.
In reviewing my conversations with Minnow, I was reminded of how colonial powers collude. For example, the way Great Britain, which enables the Israeli state and its decades-long settler project, has also divided lands and peoples elsewhere. Neil attested to that in our conversation. His ancestors were directly impacted by the 1947 partition of India, after which they moved from what’s now Pakistan into India. “In some ways, it’s strange to say that I’m Indian. I tend more towards the term South Asian because they’re just a series of lines that got drawn at a certain time that determined what name one had to use. And even though my parents heavily identify as Indian because of their experience and what they grew up around–including significant antagonism towards people on the other side of that made-up border–I don’t carry that with me because that was not my experience.” He remarks that while distance disconnected him from many aspects of his culture, it also allowed him to cultivate a different understanding of place and history.
Zooming out to other recent conversations, we are reminded how ecocide and genocide are one and the same. We remember the massacre of bison in the 19th century Plains as deliberate attacks on Indigenous people. We remember the violent uprooting of olive trees as deliberate attacks on Palestinians to this day, and the cruel forced starvation we are witnessing in Gaza due to the compounding effects of Israeli land theft, siege, attacks on farming, grazing, fishing, and thus manufactured reliance on humanitarian aid.
During Unheard Palestine: a press conference with Palestinian land-based groups, held on November 6th, 2023, and organized by A Growing Culture, Yasmeen El-Hasan of the Union of Agricultural Work Committees said, “Just two days ago, Israel bombed fisher people’s boats. The farmers whose land has not been destroyed already can’t access their land […] Agricultural lands, poultry farms, fisheries have all been damaged to the point that they are non-functional.”
During the event, Mariam Al Jaajaa of the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature (APN) also shared that: “There is a systemic attack on trees for their value for the agricultural sector [...] Israelis know that if they uproot these ancient trees, it’s more easy to uproot people.”
In her film Foragers (2022) and her article Where Nature Ends and Settlements Begin, Palestinian visual artist Jumana Manna speaks of the Israeli settler state outlawing Palestinians from their ancestral lifeways of relating to Za’atar (thyme) and artichoke-like ‘Akkoub, as just one of many prohibitions undermining food and cultural sovereignty.
Moving from interspecies relationships within place and towards time, Minnow’s former Director of Farm and Policy Programs, Mai Nguyen, shared temporal wisdom from their Vietnamese heritage. Mai remarks how they’ve learned from their lineage the power of resistance to colonialism, which goes back for thousands of years; “we would have periods of like 400 years of independence, then 200 years of colonial subjugation under China.” This taught Mai to think on longer timelines; “to say: yes, Indigenous peoples in the Americas have been colonized for 500 years of Western European presence, but how does that fit into a longer time scale of resistance? And then saying that those 500 years are not predictive of the next 500 years.” From that lineage, they draw the experiences of “maintaining the persistence; the commitment to resisting colonial powers to be a part of a solidarity movement for sovereignty here.”
Lastly, it’s important to notice the colonial severing and distortion of relationships extending to language during this time. We see consistent racist Islamophobic redefinition and censorship of Arabic words such as Intifada and Jihad. South Asian American writer Fatima Asghar shares: “All of these words, these specific concepts, this poetry, reduced to being considered ‘terrorism’; because the machines of Western propaganda have been intent on making Muslim people into savages, to justify the way that they bomb us, undercut our governments, pit us against each other, and deplete our lands.” And Lebanese-American musician and writer Hamed Sinno clarifies that Intifada انتفاضه means: “An Awakening. A brisk, vigorous motion or movement, the way a bird shakes to remove the dust weighing down its wings.”
In writing this introduction to my conversations with Minnow, I am reminded of the vigorous shaking that animals (including us) do after traumatic events, which helps us to metabolize the fear and return back to ourselves. We are living in a time of mass, vigorous movement in response to mass systemic, colonial, and imperial violence. Unapologetically sharing our truths can unearth our connections and just how much power we have in each other’s mutual care and commitment to all of our liberation. I believe we come from long lines of resistors, of people who managed to not only survive, but also create beauty amidst many endings. And I believe an honest reckoning of our personal histories will strengthen our collective bloodline.